Moments before the biggest game of his coaching career, the NFL’s most gifted offensive mind was thinking like a fan. Sean McVay anxiously waited to see what the greatest defensive coach in the history of the sport had cooked up for his Rams offense.

“I just … I can’t wait to just see what their plan is,” McVay said to one of his assistants during warmups.

Bill Belichick did not disappoint.

Over the next three hours, Belichick showed McVay and the rest of the football world what he and his defensive coaching staff had spent the prior two weeks working on: An eclectic plan that helped the Patriots limit one of the league’s most explosive offenses to a measly three points and served as more evidence that Belichick is not just the greatest coach in NFL history (that conversation is long over) but that the eight-time Super Bowl champion (if you count the two he won as a defensive coordinator, which you should) is in a class of his own.

Belichick’s plan justified McVay’s excitement. On early downs, the Patriots lined up in a front they hadn’t run all year, played an entirely new coverage and reshaped their secondary. And in obvious passing situations, they scrapped all of that and went back to their preferred man coverage with exotic fronts designed to confuse Jared Goff and the Rams offensive line.

The Patriots’ strategy wasn’t ground-breaking. After the game, Belichick summed it up in two sentences:

“We just felt like we had to put something together that would neutralize the running game and their big-play play-action passes on early downs. That’s really where they’ve killed people all year, is the 120-something explosive plays they’ve had.”

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It doesn’t take a genius to come up with that strategy. The true genius of the Patriots’ gameplan for Super Bowl LIII lies in the tactics they utilized to carry out the plan. “Strategy” and “tactics” are often used interchangeably, but there’s a subtle difference between the two and good game-planning requires both.

Belichick is both a master strategist and tactician. He can see both the big picture of what needs to be accomplished to win a game (the strategy) while also coming up with the methods to actually go out there and do it (the tactics.) Coming up with the strategy is the easy part. Deciding on tactics requires real creativity. Too often, defensive coaches lack the imagination of their offensive counterparts, which is why the offensive genius archetype is more prevalent than the defensive genius, which may die out completely when Belichick retires.

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Belichick does not lack imagination, a quality we usually assign to younger, offensive coaches like McVay. But the 66-year-old’s imagination isn’t fueled by fresh ideas, necessarily. It’s fueled by his experience and a reservoir of X’s and O’s knowledge. That wisdom, along with a willingness to adapt, next-level attention to detail and a keen eye for finding undervalued role players, is what separates him for the rest of his peers. Those characteristics also helped him come up with the most comprehensive game plan of his career, which he used to win a sixth ring as a head coach.

Let’s take a deeper look at the characteristics that make Belichick the singular coach that he is, and let’s do so through the lens of his Super Bowl LIII gameplan.

1. Creativity: Deployment of the secondary

Bill Belichick clearly does not believe “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The strength of the Patriots defense in 2018 was undoubtedly the secondary. Well, despite perfect health and solid performances throughout the playoffs, New England started a different secondary in every postseason game it played en route to winning the Super Bowl.

At least that’s how the Patriots lined up on early downs. When the Rams faced third down, Belichick reshuffled his secondary once again. Chung went back to safety, Jones moved into the slot where he’d match-up with Robert Woods, McCourty would take Josh Reynolds and J.C. Jackson, who was a de facto starter against the Chiefs and Chargers, came off the bench to cover tight end Gerald Everett.

Typically, coaches do not tinker with their lineups so frequently. Especially when those lineups are playing as well as the Pats secondary had been playing leading up to the Super Bowl. Belichick is not your typical coach. Different offenses present different problems which require different solutions.

2. Adaptability: A surprise coverage

Matt Patricia, the Lions head coach who worked under Belichick, shares his mentor’s tactical ingenuity. Patricia left the Patriots after their loss to the Eagles in Super Bowl LII, but the defensive blueprint he created this year helped his former team avenge that defeat, which Belichick admitted after the game.

“We felt like if we could make them drive it, make ‘em earn it — similar to what the Lions did — to make them just run a lot of plays and get them into third down, we felt like we could get them off the field on third down. Ultimately, we were able to do that.”

This may be the closest the Lions get to winning a Super Bowl in a while, so enjoy it, Detroit. But seriously, Patricia’s gameplan for the Rams offense was a good one, and it’s easy to see its influence on what New England did to stifle McVay’s offensive machine. One of the tactics Belichick borrowed from his former pupil was a special coverage I had not seen the Patriots, Lions or any other NFL defense run outside of New England’s and Detroit’s games against the Rams this season.

In a typical zone defense, there are two levels of coverage, so offenses will run three-level stretches to create a numbers advantage.

The bulk of the Rams’ play-action passing game is made up of three-level stretches. So, against Los Angeles, Patricia simply added a third level to his zone defense, with the strong safety (black circle) playing in between the second- and third levels of the defense in order to defend the intermediate crossing routes (yellow circle) that power the Rams’ play-action game.

Though Patricia’s coverage calls did put his safety in a position to cover those crossing routes, it’s a big ask to have him run with burners like Brandin Cooks and Robert Woods — or in this case, even Josh Reynolds.

Not wanting to ask too much of a safety, Belichick put cornerback Jonathan Jones, who ran a 4.33 at the NFL combine, in that role. He believed he was best suited for the job of chasing Cooks and Woods across the field.

The plan mostly worked. The one play where Jones’ inexperience as a safety showed was on Jason McCourty’s touchdown-saving pass break-up. A miscommunication between Devin McCourty and Jones let Cooks run wide open down the middle of the field.

Bill Belichick is the league’s most resourceful coach. He doesn’t look at players at the bottom of his roster, like Jones, and see lesser versions of his starters. He sees a player with a specific skill-set who, when the situation calls for it, can carry out a job that will help the Patriots win a game.

Like this year’s Rams team, the Bears possessed an elite running game during the 1990 season. In order to stop it, Belichick installed a front he hadn’t used all season…

In order to defend the Rams’ deadly outside-zone running game, Belichick played the exact same front. He played a four-man defensive line but flanked it with Patrick Chung and Donta Hightower, creating a six-man surface for the Patriots defense. The Rams weren’t going to get an on edge on this front.

Los Angeles, which ran outside zone more than any other team in the league, ran it just three times against New England. That’s why we saw so little of Todd Gurley, who lost snaps to C.J. Anderson for the second game in a row.

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Throwing out the six-man line served its purpose … just like it did when Belichick used the same exact front the slow down the Bears in the 1990 playoffs. Chicago finished that season second in the league in rushing. Against Belichick’s surprise six-man front, the Bears managed only 27 rushing yards on 16 attempts. Nearly three decades later, the strategy worked again, holding a Rams run game that finished third in rushing to 62 yards.

4. Attention to detail: Sean McVay’s tell

One of the hardest aspects of defending the Rams offense is discerning the run from the pass.

Because of that uniformity, it’s hard to get a read on McVay’s play-calling tendencies, but it appears Belichick was able to find one, and he tailored his defensive personnel groupings based on the intel.

Personnel-wise, New England did what any other defense would have done against the Rams: It matched the Rams’ 11-personnel sets (one running back, one tight end and three receivers) with its nickel package (five defensive backs). But L.A. has two different 11-personnel sets; one with Tyler Higbee at tight end and one with Gerald Everett. And that’s where you’ll find McVay’s tell. The Rams lined up in 11-personnel with Everett on the field 273 times during the regular season (not including garbage-time snaps), per NFL GSIS. They ran only 37 times. That’s only 14 percent of the time.

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So what did Belichick do? When Higbee was on the field, he matched the Rams with the run-stuffing 4-3 front and played that three-level coverage we’ve already covered. When Everett was the lone tight end on the field, Belichick played his nickel fronts with man coverage on the backend. With Higbee on the field, the Pats had to be mindful of the run; with Everett out there, they could focus solely on stopping the pass. And that’s what they did. The Patriots completely shut down the Rams passing game out of those three-receiver sets. Jared Goff averaged just 5.6 yards per attempt on those passes.

Other coaches may have treated every 11-personnel grouping the same. Not Belichick. He recognized the different threats posed by the Rams’ two tight ends, figured out the tendency and planned accordingly.

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The greatest coaches throughout the history of the NFL have some scheme or system attached to their legacy. Vince Lombardi had his power run scheme. Tom Landry had his 4-3 front. Bill Walsh had the West Coast Offense. Mike Shanahan had his zone-blocking run game.

What about Belichick, the greatest coach of them all? He isn’t known for one scheme in particular, and that’s why in a profession that does not lend itself to long-term brilliance, Belichick stands out. He’s the only coach to ever win multiple Super Bowls in two separate decades. And he was able to do it because there is no Belichick system that he’s committed himself to, which might be a reason his coaching tree is so underwhelming. His mind is the system, and he can’t pass that on to his assistants.

There is only one Bill Belichick.

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